Our parents generation was highly focused on achieving the "American Dream": obtaining a house, a bunch of cars, and the "white picket fence." But for new generations, the American Dream has changed. Today, new generations aspire to have freedom and flexibility in their lives. So they prefer to have access to a house, cars, and other household items.
This discussion will unpack the opportunities available given this large cultural shift away from ownership.

"How do I get customers?" That is the most common question any new business owner or startup founder has at the top of mind. However, it's also the most commonly overlooked metric of success. Many creatives/makers/innovators do not consider themselves a "sales-person", so they tend to focus on making the product, rather than selling it to more customers. Even those who find it very easy to be an extroverted sales type person has a challenging time figuring out how and where to find customers. I'll share some of my startup failures as well as what I learned that finally got me to my first paying consumer and major corporate customer.

Valentines Day 2017 was one of the toughest days for UrbanStems when we failed to deliver thousands of deliveries across the country due to fulfillment errors that cascaded into us having to shut down operations. By rallying the team to do everything possible for customers in the following days, we turned a disaster into a moment that created some of our most loyal users.

When Handy was founded in 2012, it was one of many companies responding to the “On-Demand Wave,” with everything from shipping to laundry to parking becoming available at the push of a button. As we now know, the vast majority of those companies did not survive and that model proved to be a lot more hype than reality for many industries. So how did Handy stay on top of the home services industry, achieving profitability in 2017 and closing an acquisition deal with ANGI Homeservices in October 2018? The session will focus on the difficult decisions and steady execution that has enabled Handy to grow sustainably while remaining a market leader.

In the past year we've shifted the focus of Contactually; enterprise sales went from 15% to 40% of ARR in 15 months. I'll walk through the specific steps we took to blueprint our target accounts and build an account-based sales and marketing engine. 8 of the top 20 real estate brokerages are now our customers.